[sldev] Re: [VIEWER] Dead code removal

[Argent Stonecutter]

From: Ettore Pasquini <ettore_pasquini at 3dconnexion.com>
> The "clearly" part is highly subjective,

Certainly. It's my opinion only. Parts of the viewer that I have  
worked on have the feel of a general library that's designed to be  
used by more than one program.

> depending on how much confidence  a
> reader has with the code. In this case, even if you have relatively  
> good
> knowledge, we may still not know the "second reason to exist" of a
> particular piece of code because we don't know its whole story.  
> (For reasons
> often discussed...)

Why do you need to know what that reason is? Knowing whether a  
*module* is a general library or a part of the viewer only and not  
depending on subjective assessment is useful, but knowing whether a  
file is used by the asset server or the sim or the presence server  
isn't really that useful.

On the other hand, better (or any!) class/method/function  
documentation would be useful. While the code is usually pretty self- 
documenting, it would be nice to know what the intended inputs and  
outputs are and whether the observed ones are actually intentional or  
merely side-effects. THAT would not only help understanding the code,  
but would incidentally make dead code easier to locate.